From Pixels to Views: Learning Angular-Aware and Physics-Consistent Representations for Light Field Microscopy

Light field microscopy (LFM) has become an emerging tool in neuroscience for large-scale neural imaging in vivo, with XLFM (eXtended Light Field Microscopy) notable for its single-exposure volumetric imaging, broad field of view, and high temporal resolution. However, learning-based 3D reconstruction in XLFM remains underdeveloped due to two core challenges: the absence of standardized datasets and the lack of methods that can efficiently model its angular–spatial structure while remaining physically grounded. We address these challenges by introducing three key contributions. First, we construct the XLFM-Zebrafish benchmark, a large-scale dataset and evaluation suite for XLFM reconstruction. Second, we propose Masked View Modeling for Light Fields (MVM-LF), a self-supervised task that learns angular priors by predicting occluded views, improving data efficiency. Third, we formulate the Optical Rendering Consistency Loss (ORC Loss), a differentiable rendering constraint that enforces alignment between predicted volumes and their PSF-based forward projections. On the XLFM-Zebrafish benchmark, our method improves PSNR by 7.7\% over state-of-the-art baselines. Code and datasets are publicly available at: https://github.com/hefengcs/XLFM-Former.